Twenty years of investment, a $2.95 billion commitment, and the backing of the European Union could not overcome the farmers of Gornje Nedeljice.
In December 2004, Rio Tinto geologists drilling in western Serbia's Jadar Valley pulled up something from the drill core they had never seen before. What followed was two decades of geological triumph, political theatre, mass protest, and corporate retreat - a story that ends not with a mine, but with a valley that looks almost exactly as it did when the drilling began.
A soft, white, powdery material - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - pulled from the core did not match any known mineral. Sent to the Natural History Museum in London and Canada's National Research Council, it was confirmed in 2006 as an entirely new mineral. The team named it jadarite, after the valley where it was found.
The timing produced one of mining's stranger footnotes. That same year, the film Superman Returns hit cinemas, and Lex Luthor's stolen kryptonite was labeled with almost exactly the same chemical formula. Jadarite made headlines across the world - not for its geological significance, but for its resemblance to a fictional substance designed to weaken superheroes. Rio Tinto's Serbian scientist Nenad Grubin had a dry response: "So far we haven't found it has a similar effect on the superheroes who discovered jadarite."
The playful press coverage quickly faded. What did not fade was the commercial reality. The Jadar Valley, it turned out, sat on one of the largest lithium deposits ever found. Reserves of 118 million tonnes of ore grading 1.8% lithium oxide - a grade far superior to most commercial hard rock deposits. The deposit could theoretically supply 90% of Europe's current lithium needs from a single mine. Rio Tinto quietly began building a case that would take another two decades to resolve, and not in its favor.
For years after the discovery, Rio Tinto conducted exploration work in the valley without telling residents why. In May 2019, farmer Momcilo Alimpic was working his family land in Radjevina, a hamlet in the hills of Jadar, when he heard an unusual commotion nearby. He found a group of men moving across his property. They were Rio Tinto researchers. They told him his land sat on the edge of an area rich in lithium.
"Until then, we had no clue about it," his daughter Marija, a language teacher, later told the New Statesman. "The company hadn't contacted us, or anyone in the region." In the weeks that followed, the full picture emerged: Rio Tinto had spent years quietly mapping and acquiring land for what would be Europe's largest lithium mine. The family's fields had been earmarked as a waste dump site. Chemical tailings from jadarite processing require large volumes of sulphuric acid and would, by independent expert assessment, render the surrounding agricultural land barren.
The Alimpics were not alone. Zlatko Kokanovic, a 48-year-old farmer from Gornje Nedeljice, the village sitting directly above the proposed mine site, became one of the movement's most visible faces. He founded the association Ne Damo Jadar - "We Won't Give Up Jadar." His position was unambiguous. "All of us here, we are ready to lose our lives," he told the Associated Press in August 2024. "They can shoot. That is the only way they can open the mine." He has five children. He farms the same land his family has worked for generations. The Korenita River runs through the valley below.
The environmental concerns were serious and contested. Belgrade University environmental chemistry professor Dragana Djordjevic led a research group that found significantly elevated downstream concentrations of boron, arsenic, and lithium in rivers near Rio Tinto's exploratory wells - damage from drilling, before any mine had been built. Rio Tinto disputed the methodology and successfully had the paper retracted from Scientific Reports, calling it scientifically flawed. River scientist Mark Macklin of the University of Lincoln, who had previously consulted for Rio Tinto, described the company's approach to the paper as "heavy-handed." The scientific dispute, unresolved, fed precisely the distrust the company was struggling to overcome.
Serbia's government signed a memorandum with Rio Tinto in 2017, committing to a 2023 start date. The project moved through environmental assessments and planning approvals. In 2020, the government approved an environmental impact assessment for the mine. Things appeared to be on track.
Then the streets filled up.
Protests that began locally in 2021 escalated through early 2022 into mass demonstrations across Serbia. The coalition was unusual - farmers from the Jadar Valley alongside Belgrade students and artists, environmental groups alongside opposition politicians, left and right. Tennis champion Novak Djokovic posted his support for the protesters on Instagram. More than 290,000 Serbians signed a petition calling for a ban on lithium mining. In January 2022, under sustained pressure ahead of national elections, then-Prime Minister Ana Brnabic announced the cancellation of the spatial planning permits. "All permits were annulled," she said. "We put an end to Rio Tinto in Serbia."
It was not the end. Rio Tinto continued to buy land and maintain its Serbian subsidiary throughout the suspension. In July 2024, Serbia's Constitutional Court ruled that the 2022 government cancellation had been unconstitutional, reinstating the project. Three days later, at a Critical Raw Materials Summit in Belgrade attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic, President Aleksandar Vucic signed a memorandum of understanding with the EU on sustainable raw materials and battery supply chains. Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis representatives were also present, signing letters of intent related to EV battery supply.
The protests erupted again within days. Tens of thousands marched in Belgrade - farmers and students and city-dwellers - chanting "You will not dig" and "Treason." Kokanovic led a rail blockade in Loznica on July 7. He and six other Ne Damo Jadar members were arrested and later indicted, with prosecutors seeking a 14-month prison sentence. In December 2024, Kokanovic drove a tractor from Gornje Nedeljice to Belgrade's Slavija Square to join student demonstrations. Police seized the tractor. His fellow activist Nebojsa Petkovic was handcuffed and briefly detained.
Europe's urgency around Jadar was driven by a specific fear: dependence on China. China controls 80% of global lithium refining capacity, 77% of cell production capacity, and 60% of battery component manufacturing. The EU's 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act was built explicitly to reduce that exposure. In June 2025, the European Commission designated Jadar as one of 13 strategic projects under the Act - the only one for lithium and boron, and the only one outside EU borders.
The geopolitical case was genuine, but it carried a cost. In mid-2025, Rio Tinto revised the project's capital estimate from $2.4 billion to $2.95 billion - a $550 million increase attributed largely to meeting EU environmental and human rights standards. Chad Blewitt, Rio Tinto's managing director for Jadar, described the new estimate as reflecting "the highest environmental standards." For critics, it confirmed what they had suspected: the original plan had not been designed with those standards in mind.
The EU designation did not ease the permitting process. Serbia's Ministry of Environmental Protection had issued requirements in November 2024 for a full Environmental Impact Assessment. Rio Tinto submitted its request to define the EIA scope in September 2024. The ministry set a one-year timeline for the company to submit complete documentation. None of this was moving quickly. Activist group Mars sa Drine, joined by environmental NGOs from Germany, Romania, Spain and Portugal, had already filed legal notices to the European Commission challenging the strategic designation.
In August 2025, Simon Trott replaced Jakob Stausholm as CEO of Rio Tinto - the company's first leadership change in five years. Trott, previously head of Rio's iron ore division, moved quickly to restructure the business: he reorganized Rio Tinto into three segments - iron ore, aluminum combined with lithium, and copper - and announced a drive to reduce costs and management layers. The company had already cut roughly 480 jobs at its Australian iron ore operations.
Jadar sat awkwardly in this new framework. It was a development-stage project with no clear permitting timeline, located in a politically turbulent country, with a cost estimate that had just risen by more than half a billion dollars. Lithium prices globally had crashed 85% from their 2022 peak due to oversupply, with battery-grade lithium carbonate trading at roughly $12,000 to $15,000 per tonne - far below the levels that had originally underpinned the project's economics. Rio had also, in October 2024, completed a $6.7 billion acquisition of Arcadium Lithium, bringing three other lithium projects into the portfolio, including the already-approved $2.5 billion Rincon project in Argentina.
At a Goldman Sachs investor event in London, Trott gave a signal that those paying attention could read clearly. "The bar is really high," he said. "We can progress only the very best of them." Barclays analyst Amos Fletcher interpreted the remark as a signal that Jadar, along with the inherited hard rock lithium mines Mt Cattlin in Western Australia and Galaxy in Canada, might eventually be sold.
On November 13, 2025, Bloomberg reported the contents of an internal Rio Tinto memo. Jadar would be moved to "care and maintenance" - a dormant state, not an outright abandonment, but a suspension of meaningful investment. "Given the lack of progress in permitting, we are not in a position to sustain the same level of spend and resource allocation," the memo stated. The company confirmed the memo's contents. Paul Graves, head of Rio's lithium division, would leave the company. A two-decade effort to mine Europe's largest lithium deposit was effectively on ice.
Rio Tinto's suspension is not simply a corporate setback. It exposes a structural problem in Europe's critical minerals strategy. The EU predicted a 60-fold surge in lithium demand by 2050. Its Fit for 55 package demands a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Those targets require battery production at a scale that currently runs almost entirely through Chinese supply chains. Jadar was meant to be part of the answer.
The Electrive analyst community was blunt about the consequences. The next-largest European lithium project with real near-term certainty is Keliber in Finland, expected to start production in 2026 - but at roughly one-tenth the scale of Jadar. The Barroso project in Portugal remains contested. Without Jadar, Europe's lithium supply chain reverts to Australia, Chile, and Argentina - and ultimately to processing that runs through China.
Glyn Lawcock, head of metals and mining at Barrenjoey Markets, summarized Rio Tinto's bind precisely: "They've only got so much capital they can allocate, and they've allocated quite a bit of capital to lithium already through the acquisition of Arcadium." The Rincon project in Argentina is advancing. Serbia is not.
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